A story for you; I won't call it the absolute truth, but will go with the Hollywood-esque "based on true events".  I hope you're at least mildly entertained if nothing else.

One day in mid-June, when I was six years old, a car pulled up to our house, and a man and a woman got out and came to the door.  My mother, who was just finishing up some housework, went to answer; she seemed nervous, and after talking to them for a moment, let them in and introduced them to me, then told me to "be good", before disappearing into her room.  

The woman was Carla, the man was Jake; Carla I recall was short and not very pretty, and reminded me a lot of a snotty teenage girl who lived down the road I'd met a few times (though she was older):  dismissive, looking down at me like I was a bug.  Jake was head and shoulders above her and my mother (who scarcely stood four foot nine) and was practically a giant to me.  I was nervous around strangers and Jake's size and the way he looked down at me made me wholly uncomfortable.  Oh--and I can't forget the sunglasses.  He wore them inside, and they were so dark you couldn't see his eyes at all.  While Carla made what amounted to small talk with me, Jake just started.  It felt like ages before my mother came back.

When she did, I could see she was all dressed up:  white high heel pumps, a short skirt, a red blouse, hose.  She had on makeup as well.  She looked even more nervous and told me she had to go somewhere for a bit, that Carla would look after me until she got back, and promised she'd get me this toy I wanted (for the life of me I can't recall what it was now) if I behaved.  I didn't like it but I wasn't the type of kid to disobey so I agreed, and she and Jake left; I tried to follow them outside but Carla blocked by way, insisting I show her my room.  Once I did, she told me--flatly--that I was to stay put in there and not bug her at all.  

I won't bore you with details; suffice to say I didn't like Carla that much that I did stay in my room, all day, and into the night, coming out only when Carla said "I guess I should feed you" or something to that effect, and gave me a bowl of cold Chef Boyardee ravioli.  I asked when my mother was coming home and she just said, "Not soon enough" and sent me back to my room after.  I gave her a fuss at bedtime, as my mother still wasn't home, but she wasn't having it; she smacked me across the ass and that ended that.

My mother did come home sometime later, waking me up long enough to tuck me in; it was dark so I couldn't see her, but she sounded funny, like she'd been crying.  The next day she wouldn't say a thing about where she'd been but she seemed out of it, and a little short-tempered.

The following week Jake and Carla returned, and again my mother, dressed up, left with Jake; this became a continuous thing.  Those two would show up and off she'd go, for hours at a time, usually not coming home until after I was in bed.  I'd spend my time wondering where she was and avoiding Carla, who mostly sat and talked on the phone or watched TV.  Sometimes it seemed I saw more of Carla than my mother.  Also, while Carla was a constant, Jake was not; sometimes another man would show up instead, or my mother would go out on her own.  She never seemed to want to go, but always insisted to me that she did.

For several weeks early into the school year it was not uncommon for me to come home and find her gone and Carla there; then things would quiet down until spring.  A few days after my seventh birthday I came home and my mother told me Carla would be watching me for "a few days", which naturally, upset me.  It upset her too; she started crying as well, and I don't really remember how we both calmed down, but the next day I came home from school, and Carla was there, and was there for the next three days.  This was just one of many times over the next few years, this would happen.

By the time I was nine years old, my mother's "forays" were becoming commonplace; sometimes a few hours, sometimes several days.  Carla was occasionally replaced by Beth (who was about as nice), a middle-aged woman who was actually nice but maddeningly vague about answering any questions I had about where my mother would go (my mother was just as vague.)  I had little to go on myself; the few times I saw her go (or more rarely come home) I did notice she got into a car with at least two men in it, along with any who came to the house.  

A thing you should understand:  I might have been a kid, and pretty naive about a lot of things (okay, a WHOLE lot of things) but I knew what kidnapping, being tied up, etc. were all about; I'd been imagining such things about myself six age five, and had started including classmates, teachers, etc. into them.  I knew nothing about sex, so that never entered it until my mid-teens; and my mother had been a growing part of those fantasies since I was six, just another victim alongside me, or alone--I drew most of my knowledge of all this from TV, 70s era cop and action shows being chock full of women kidnap victims.

Anyway, by the time I was nine, I was thinking that was what was happening to her; I didn't really think of or care about all the details but it made sense to me. 

Moving back to things, this went on for literally years, well into my early teens; by then Carla was no longer part of things at least, and I would badger my mother, sometimes with loaded questions, about what went on, and never got any answers.  Eventually I gave up, and not long after her death when I was nineteen, I was going through her stuff when I found a locked strongbox.  Some work with a pry bar and drill got it open and what did I find inside?  Dozens upon dozens of Polaroid pics of her:  in nearly all of them she was bound and/or gagged, sometimes nude, sometimes clothed, sometimes partially nude; in several she was giving head or being fucked, and clearly not a willing participant.  Each photo had dates, and went back to the mid-70s when all this had begun; laid out it told a tale of her as the apparent willing-but-unwilling victim of a group of men who apparently used her as a bondage and sex toy.  There were no names and only a a few faces I could see in them, but it was erotic and liberating all at once to find them, but also maddening because while I could see the story played out, I didn't know the details!

As luck would have it, I ran--largely by accident--into Jake.  I almost didn't recognize him; he was still tall, but he'd gotten rid of the sunglasses and age and cancer had taken a toll on him.  In fact I might have passed him by had he not said, "Robert Dark?  Are you Robert Dark?"  To make a long story short he wanted to "confess" to things:

Shortly before all of this began, my mother borrowed money from a local thug type we'll just call "Diamond Jim"--imagine a very evil Boss Hogg of Dukes of Hazzard if you like, a man so slick and slimy he got away with most everything.  Of course my mother couldn't repay this money--she was told it was a "gift" and he later reneged--but Diamond Jim liked her looks and body, and he had certain obvious tastes, so the deal was my mother would become the plaything of Jake and some of his friends, and these sessions, which were filmed (8mm) and photographed, would "pay" her debt.  You can guess the rest:  interest compounded on the money meant she had to keep doing it.  Adding to that was a promise that if she tried to back out or seek help, they would take me instead; naturally, that kept her involved.  Ultimately the only thing that got her out of it was Diamond Jim losing interest in her almost a decade later.

I kept those pictures for a long time, until they were lost during a move; they provided the only real evidence and details of things that went on, but the memory of them continues to fuel my fantasies to this day.

RD